Batter Up! Bottom of the First
The Home Team Comes to Bat
My earliest memory of Major League Baseball came three years after the broken nose incident. The Pittsburgh Pirates, our home team, had made it to the 1960 World Series for the first time since 1927, when my mom was 3 and my dad was 9. I was 5 that year myself, and really had no idea what all the fuss was about. I just knew that everywhere I went, I heard people talking about the “world serious” — but it didn’t sound serious, it sounded exciting!
The whole city was abuzz with talk of the Pirates, and the Pirates delivered with one of the most dramatic World Series victories of all time. They were pitted against the mighty Yankees of New York, a team that had been to the World Series 9 times in the past 12 years, and had won 7 of those series.
The Yankees had an intimidating lineup boasting great names like Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Moose Skowron. They were managed by the great Casey Stengel. The Pirates were just a bunch of relative unknowns, a young and scrappy team of misfits that had spent most of the previous decade in the National League’s cellar. They should have been content with just having made it to the World Series, and gone quietly into the night as the mighty Yankees rolled over them.
Sure enough, those Yankees won their games by scary, lopsided scores — 16–3, 10–0, and 12–0. However, the World Series is a best of 7 series — the first team to win 4 games wins the series. The Pirates would push this series to 7 games with wins of their own by scores of 6–4, 3–2, and 5–2. Outscored at this point 46–17, the score that counted was the number of wins, and they were all tied up, 3–3, on that score. The championship of the world of baseball would be decided by whoever won game 7, which took place in Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, the Pirates’ home.
It would prove to be the most exciting Game 7 ever, maybe in any sport, but certainly in baseball. The Pirates went up 4–0 after 2 innings with their ace, Vern “The Deacon” Law on the mound. The Yankees stormed back to take a 5–4 lead in the 6th, then extended their lead to 7–4 in the 8th. But in the bottom of the 8th, the Pirates re-seized the lead with 5 more runs putting them up 9–7. All they had to do was put the Yankees down in the top of the 9th, and the championship was theirs. But the Yankees came back to tie it all up in the top of the 9th, 9–9, to set the stage for the most unlikely of heroes.
The first batter in the bottom of the 9th was light-hitting, slick-fielding second baseman Bill Mazeroski, who just happened to wear the number 9 on the back of his uniform. On the second pitch thrown to him, he caught all of it with his bat and launched a fly ball high into the air in left field, where the great Yogi Berra ran back to the ivy-covered wall beside the big Longines scoreboard, then stopped, bowed his head, and turned around to make a slow, sad trot back towards the Yankees dugout while that ball disappeared into the trees beyond that wall in Schenley Park. The great Mickey Mantle would cite that moment as the saddest of his entire career. I watched an interview with him where he actually cried when remembering that series.
However, in Pittsburgh, an entire city went completely insane as their new hero danced and whooped his way around the bases in what had to be the most joyful trip around the bases ever! The excitement that abounded caught me up in its grip, and never let go as the seeds were planted for this baseball lover’s lifelong love affair with a game.
The first game I ever attended was on June 2nd, 1962, at that same Forbes Field. The Pirates were playing an expansion team in its first year of existence, the Houson Colt 45’s. My brother Chris and his friend Jackie Robbins took me to the game, and we sat in the Left Field Bleachers, the cheapest seats in the park.
Everything about that first game was magical to me. I was in awe of the whole scene — the sounds, the smells, the joy of being in the stands with all those people cheering on the home team Pirates. The field was impossibly huge, with so much outfield grass, just acres and acres of it. Forbes Field was indeed one of the largest parks in the game.
I developed an instant hero-worship of the Pirates players, especially their right fielder, a Puerto Rican fellow named Roberto Clemente. He had a certain regal bearing about him, but when he was chasing after a ball, or running the bases, he ran like his hair was on fire, playing the game with a palpable passion — when he was on the field, you knew it. He also had a rifle cannon for an arm, and could throw a runner out at the plate from the wall in right field, with a perfectly accurate throw on a line. At that first game, he hit a home run to the opposite field that nearly cleared the roof above the stands in right field — a feat no other right-handed batter ever accomplished, and only 7 left-handed batters managed in the 61 year history of that ballpark.
In subsequent trips to the ballpark with my brother Chris, he showed me lots of little tricks for getting around the park and seeing interesting things. I learned how to shimmy up a rain spout to get from the left-field bleachers into the 3rd base reserved seats. The bleachers only cost a dollar to get into, while those reserved seats were much more, 3 or 4 dollars a seat. There was also a tunnel that run under the stands that you could access through a green “No Admittance” door in the concourse area that was usually locked, but on occasion would be left unlocked.
If you followed the tunnel around it eventually led you to the players’ locker room. It was one of those things that were scary as hell, but the reward made it worth it. The tunnel had a dirt floor, and was mostly dark with only the occasional dim light. Apparently the players sometimes used it to sneak out of the park without running into autograph seekers. I ventured into that tunnel alone several times, only once making it all the way around and into the players’ clubhouse.
Once there, I stood there with my mouth gaping in awe of all these players who were so much larger than life to me, and clearly looked like I didn’t belong there. It wasn’t long before a guard came by and questioned what I was doing there. As I was stammering and trying to think of something convincing to say, Roberto Clemente came out of the trainer’s room and told the guard, “Oh, he’s with me — I told him he could come by the locker room for a few minutes today.” He smiled and winked at me, and let me hang out there for a few minutes. After a little while he looked at me and said, “we have to go out on the field now, so you might want to run along now.” He smiled and winked at me again, and I left there feeling better than I’d ever felt, as that was one of the kindest things anyone ever did for me. As if he hadn’t already won me over with the way he played and carried himself on the field, I became a lifelong fan of the man, the one hero who never let me down. Even when he went down himself, plunged to the sea while still in the prime of his life, he did so while on a noble mission to bring relief supplies to earthquake ravaged Nicaragua.
You’ll hear more about Roberto — much more. So much of my love for baseball is wrapped up in that one player, one who played the game with more apparent passion than anyone I’ve ever watched over my 60 years of being a fan of the game.
Well, that’s the bottom of the first and I’ve barely begun to tell you all the things I love about the great game of baseball. But that’s the beauty of it — there’s still 8 more innings to go, and if we’re lucky, this one might even go into extra innings! It all depends on the score after 9 innings. We’ll see you again in the top of the second. Until then — Play Ball!!
